Inside the IMF and Should the government measure our national happiness?

Here are two BBC Radio broadcasts that can be set as homework research task: one on the workings of the IMF and the other on Should the government measure our national happiness? . Both remain available until 12:00AM Thu, 1 Jan 2099 by which time I will probably have been allowed to retire.

Inside The IMF
In the past two years the International Monetary Fund has come out of the shadows to play a key role in efforts deal with global financial crisis.Governments say they want it to fix the global economy as well. But what do those working inside the IMF in Washington really think about their role? And are they up to the job? The BBC Economics Editor, Stephanie Flanders has had an exclusive opportunity to interview staff including the Managing Director of the IMF, Dominique Strauss Kahn.

Should the government measure our national happiness?
They call it Blue Monday - January 24th - the unhappiest day of the year. Christmas seems a long time ago, but the bills for it are dropping on the mat, we’ve failed at all our New Year’s resolutions, the weather is awful and all we’ve got to look forward to is February. But do not despair, our government is coming to the rescue. Politicians are so worried about our state of mind it was their New Year’s resolution to do something about it.

On January 5th was the first meeting of the “Measuring National Well-being Advisory Forum” and the Office of National Statistics has just started a consultation on making general well-being (GWB) a key national statistic, alongside the more traditional things like Gross Domestic Product. Setting aside the question can you measure happiness - the moral question is should you?

Money isn’t the key to happiness and perhaps we should see ourselves as more than just units of economic production and consumption. But is it the job of the state to concern itself with our emotional life and build that in to policy making? A lot of what makes us happy as individuals may not be very good for us, our fellow man, or society as a whole. Will we start being fed a very particular one-size fits all view of happiness and “the good life”? Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is all very well, but should happiness be an end in itself? Shouldn’t we be asking what we as individuals can to do make other people’s lives better, rather than asking what the state can do to make us happier?

Chaired by Michael Buerk with Melanie Phillips, Matthew Taylor, Claire Fox and Clifford Longley.

Witnesses: Professor Lord Richard Layard, Director, the Centre for Economic Performance, LSE Simon Blackburn, Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge Anthony Seldon, Master, Wellington College Phillip Hodson, Psychotherapist and author who popularised ‘phone-in’ therapy in his role as Britain’s first ‘agony uncle’.